After 60 years of making music, radical English singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson turns his attention to the post-financial-crash political landscape in this new album, made up of original compositions and rescued old songs.

On the title track, ‘Karl Marx is scratching his head/they ought to be shooting the bankers/But they’re giving them money instead’. ‘Looters’ finds Rosselson comparing the rioters of August 2011 with the industrial-scale, officially-sanctioned looting carried out by ‘the Brutish Empire’, while ‘Sixty Quid A Week’ takes aim at Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that he could live on the current level of unemployment benefit.

Other topics tackled include so-called welfare cheats, the looming climate crisis, and the recent Gaza wars on the moving ‘Ballad of Rivka and Mohammed’. On the latter, Rosselson – a long-time supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians – combines the story of a girl killed in the Vilna Ghetto in 1942 with the Israeli bombing of four Palestinian boys playing on a beach in 2014. Throughout, Rosselson is assisted by a number of other musicians, including Janet Russell and Roy Bailey who lend a hand on the wonderfully-titled ‘I’m Going Where The Suits Will Shine My Shoes.’

Long out of step with popular music and the British folk scene, Rosselson’s music and voice is something of an acquired taste. However, activists who take the time to listen will find a fresh and knowledgeable take on contemporary politics – often caustic, sometimes angry and always right on the money.

Rosselson’s detailed and amused introductions to his songs in the liner notes – with repeated references to the privileged background of the austerity-crazed government – are worth studying in themselves. In addition, his nimble, humorous wordplay will provide activists with some light relief. And like his most famous song, the left-wing anthem ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, the music here will surely inspire anyone involved in struggles against established power.

I end with bad news. Now 81, Rosselson has announced that this will be his final recording. But there is good news too: the brilliant Where Are The Barricades? is a fitting end to a rich and humane recording career that will no doubt continue to entertain, nourish and enlighten progressive activists across the world for years to come. And luckily much of Rosselson extensive back catalogue is available through the PM audio series.

Comprised of four long articles previously published in the London Review of Books, the latest book from legendary American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh critically examines the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Citing senior – often unnamed – government, intelligence and military sources (there are no footnotes), Hersh’s version of events is significantly different from the official narrative pushed by Western governments and a supportive corporate media.

Though it gives its name to the collection’s title, the chapter on the assassination of the al-Qa’eda leader is arguably the least interesting to peace and anti-war activists. Rather it is his revelations about Western involvement in Syria and Libya that are the real bombshells.

According to Hersh, in 2011, the CIA, working with MI6 and funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, set up a ‘rat line’ to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya to the insurgents in Syria. These weapons often ended up in the hands of jihadists, Hersh explains. Turning to the infamous August 2013 sarin gas attack, Hersh’s sources suggest that there is little evidence Assad’s forces carried out the operation, and that the Obama administration cherry-picked the intelligence just as the Bush administration did over Iraq. Hersh instead points to the Al-Nusra Front rebel group and Turkey as more likely culprits.

Though Hersh has a long history of uncovering the dark truths of US foreign policy – he broke the stories of the My Lai massacre in 1969 and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 – the accessible reportage found here differs so radically from what we’ve been told that it’s difficult for the lay person to know what to think. Of course, the best way to check the accuracy of Hersh’s exposés would be for the mainstream media to follow-up on the stories, though this is unlikely to happen.

Furthermore, Hersh’s concern with the machinations of ‘high politics’, though necessary to understand, means activists need to do some work joining the dots to areas where they can most make a difference. For example, in a recent interview Obama noted that a ‘major factor’ in his decision to suddenly step back from military action against Syria in August 2013 – a decision mentioned in the book – ‘was the failure of [David] Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament.’

As reports noted at the time, the outcome of the parliamentary vote was, in large part, a reaction to the unpopularity of the Iraq war. In short, in 2013, British public opinion played a key role in stopping another US-led war in the Middle East – a very hopeful and relevant analysis that Hersh’s otherwise important book doesn’t reveal.

Renting from an unscrupulous private landlord can mean cold rooms, damage to your health and lack of privacy. Worst of all is the insecurity of a ‘no fault’ eviction, legal under Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, making it difficult for tenants to make long-term plans, or for their children to settle in school.

Drawing on their own careful research and one author’s personal experience of eviction, this book exposes the realities of living in privately-rented accommodation in the UK.

Through interviews with landlords, Walker shows how some homeowners in the UK’s most expensive cities consider themselves ‘accidental’ landlords, letting to a friend under an ‘informal’ agreement. For others it is just ‘common sense’ to charge as high a rent as possible and take advantage of people’s basic need for a place to live. Both, Walker argues, are turning the private rental market into what she aptly calls ‘the inequality machine’.

Several interviewees point to the lack of political will to improve conditions, even though private renters make up a fifth of households. Baron Best, a supporter of housing reform, is quoted as saying: ‘The government doesn’t want to put its hand in its pocket [to provide housing]. Private landlords allow them to turn a blind eye.’ This suggests it is an important moment for tenants to take action but, the authors argue, it is difficult for tenants to act collectively against so many different landlords.

In his background history, Samir Jeraj highlights moments when tenants did take direct action against landlords, such as the Glasgow rent strike of 1915, during the First World War. The strike, supported by the labour movement, spread to many other cities and was ultimately successful because workers were needed for factories supplying munitions. The government restricted rents to pre-war levels as a result.

This account – and the later example of the mass squatting movement of 1946 – raises the question of how today’s renters could be similarly supported, perhaps by the unions (as, we learn, has happened in Sweden).

Putting this book into the context of peace activism made me consider why, if war-time governments were able to impose rent restrictions, our own government can leave its own citizens to the mercy of rich and powerful landlords – and create policies that focus more on access to credit than making sure that all citizens are adequately housed.

Spanning the century from 1910 to 2010, this engaging social history shows how a group of people without wealth or power (the working class) were able to gain some measure of control over their lives before losing it again.

In 1910, competent servants had a place for life, but they had to ‘know their place’, accepting decisions made for them by their ‘betters’ ‘in their best interests’.

However, after 1918, many women were forced to take lower wages, or return to domestic service, as men came home.

1926 saw the failure of the General Strike – ‘A desperate cry for manhood’, according to the daughter of one of the striking miners. The government and top TUC leaders showed more concern for the coal owners than for the miners. (Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, later received a peerage.)

In the Second World War, negotiations between employers and workers raised the latter’s expectations and sense of entitlement. As in the First World War, women did a range of jobs previously only done by men, but were often denied such employment after demobilisation.

Todd also exposes various myths that have helped the 1% to keep their positions: welfare provision makes people lazy; ‘we are all in it together’; and the idea that wealth ‘trickles down’.

While working people have been grateful for better health, education and welfare, these perks have not changed underlying inequalities: they have not redistributed wealth or power.

For Todd, class is not a dominant factor in self-identification. Instead, values dominate in that process, and material aspirations like home ownership have not displaced caring and striving for fairness using trade unions and community action.

Moreover, despite recent reversals for the working class, she has not given up hope and ends her book optimistically.

In particular, she recommends that we learn lessons from this history, which can help working people imagine progress on their own terms: valuing the collective experience of their lives and linking this to the wider society.

In this short but timely introduction, leading US anti-war academic and activist Phyllis Bennis examines the rapid growth of Islamic State and the rise of the new global war on terror waged by the US and its allies in the Middle East.

Written in a question/answer format, Bennis addresses a series of questions including: What are the origins of ISIS? What was behind the US decision to escalate military involvement in the Middle East in 2014? and: Isn’t military force necessary when faced with such a violent force as ISIS?

Her most valuable contribution is to underline the connection between Western military involvement and expanding radicalism, tracing the rise of ISIS as a response to the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

She cogently analyses how the toppling of Ba’ath leader Saddam Hussein in favour of a Shi’a (and US-backed) government created a lot of resentment amongst disenfranchised Sunni communities and ex-military leaders who then started bearing the brunt of ethnic cleansing. Their subsequent support for Sunni-affiliated ISIS strengthened the Islamic State’s position in both Iraq and Syria.

During the 2011 protests in Syria, ISIS first appeared in opposition to Bashar Al-Assad’s Alawite (Shi’a) regime, later turning violently against the other opposition groups. Bennis carefully notes how the sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’a is far more about power and identity politics than religion: the ultimate goal of Iraq’s government is not to impose its interpretation of Islamic practices but to preserve the United States’ absolute power in the region.

She also analyses the complex web of relations in the Middle East that have also contributed to the rise of ISIS, including the struggle for the control of oil in the Arab Gulf and the political tensions between Israel and Iran. Notably, she examines the crucial role of Saudi Arabia – the United States’ most important financial partner and the recipient of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms each year.

Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam has led the country to actively finance ISIS as part of its anti-Shi’a agenda in the Middle East. This, Bennis notes, has made ISIS the ‘richest insurgent in the world’.

Obama’s 2014 decision to escalate military warfare in Iraq is not only causing more civilian deaths but is also playing directly into ISIS’s propaganda tactics, gaining them wider support. So what are Bennis’ alternatives to war and occupation? In six points, she proposes: stop the airstrikes; withdraw US troops from Iraq and Syria; stop flooding the region with arms; reverse the US law that criminalises conflict resolution with blacklisted organisations like the Turkish Kurdish insurgent group, the PKK; return diplomacy to centre stage; support local ceasefires; and generate pressure for new and inclusive negotiations to end the civil war.

In a last-minute postscript about the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris, Bennis warns against the Bush-type response waged in 2001, pointing out that: ‘it doesn’t have to be that way in Paris…. Maybe they can get it right.’ But president Hollande’s reaction and the UK’s subsequent decision to join France’s efforts in bombing ISIS-controlled areas in Syria, like Raqqa, is a clear signal that the lesson still hasn’t been learned today.

We have a really good run of New Left Reviews for sale. It’s not complete, and it doesn’t start from the very beginning, but it is substantial and includes rare 60s and 70s editions. The run starts with issue #13 (series 1) from January 1962 and goes up to issue #78 (series 2) dated December 2012.

The extraordinary life of Rosa Luxemburg – Marxist economist, cat-lover and legendary figure of the revolutionary left – is given a memorable graphic novel treatment in Kate Evans’ latest book.

A ‘fictional representation of factual events’, it takes us from her childhood in Poland (tasked by her school with writing a poem for the visit of the German kaiser, she produced one attacking ‘that creeping toad Bismarck’), through her pre-First World War revolutionary agitation in Poland and Germany (which led to her imprisonment in the Warsaw citadel), to her opposition to the First World War itself (during which she was interned by the German government as a threat to the state) and her murder in 1919, at the age of 47, during the suppression of Germany’s post-war revolutionary upheavals.

Luxemburg’s voluminous (and often lyrical) correspondence and her tempestuous love life also feature heavily.

There are 34 pages of dense endnotes (which took me as long to read as the rest of the book), which give full explanations of ‘any deviation from the historical record’, as well as extensive quotes from Luxemburg’s own writings and a wide range of other information, ranging from a link for a YouTube video illustrating how Luxemburg (who suffered from uncorrected congenital hip dysplasia) might have walked, to ‘the textual authority for Luxemburg achieving orgasm’.

A fair amount of space is also given over to explanations of Marxist economics and some of Luxemburg’s own work in political economy.

Rightly or wrongly, I’m sceptical about the current relevance of Luxemburg’s theoretical explanations, either for the financial crises that plague capitalism, or for the latter’s role in the origins of the First World War. However, for me, it is Luxemburg’s ethical response to the world in which she found herself – and her commitment to (in her own words) ‘burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden bitter tears’ of the oppressed – that remains her most inspiring legacy for today’s activists, and which Evans’ book captures so vividly.

A staunch anti-militarist (in 1913 she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for urging a crowd not to murder ‘our French or other foreign brothers’ in the event of a war) and opponent of the First World War, Luxemburg also spoke out bravely against colonialism, giving the lie to the oft-repeated excuse that human sensibilities were somehow radically different 100 years ago.

Thus, during the 1911 ‘Morocco crisis’ she condemned her own German Social Democratic party (SPD), in the pages of the Leipziger Volkzeitung, for a leaflet it had produced justifying its failure to organise against the possibility of an imminent war: ‘In the whole of the leaflet there is not one word about the native inhabitants of the colonies, not a word about their rights, interests and sufferings because of the international policy’, she wrote. ‘The leaflet repeatedly speaks of “England’s splendid colonial policy” without mentioning the periodic famine and spread of typhoid in India, extermination of the Australian aborigines and the hippopotamus-hide lash on the backs of the Egyptian fellah.’ She was equally critical of Germany’s own pre-war atrocities.

A human being, rather than a plaster saint, Luxemburg was also, as one would expect, a woman of contradictions. As Evans notes, like the rest of the upper echelons of the SPD, Luxemburg’s ‘sympathies with the trials of the working classes didn’t extend to their personal lives’, and she not only employed servants but also appears to have treated them fairly strictly. ‘It is possible,’ one biographer has written ‘that Luxemburg’s only real contact with the working class may have been through servants and [her] audiences applauding’.

A true labour of love (Evans read everything by Luxemburg that she could find in English translation, and – as Evans herself says – 19th-century socialists sometimes seem to have been writing as if they were being paid by the word), Red Rosa features some stunning images and many memorable scenes. And if it ultimately doesn’t quite reach the heights of Evans’ earlier masterwork, Copse: The Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting, that is certainly no criticism.

Review by Gabriel Carlyle, originally posted by Peace News (http://peacenews.info/node/8297/kate-evans-red-rosa-graphic-biography-rosa-luxemburg).

Every now and then, Peace News sends me a book which I absolutely love from start to finish. Despite the clunky title, this is one of those books. It’s a terrific read that tells you everything you need to know about why austerity is prevalent, what it does and some pointers on how to resist it.

The book is in two parts: the first, ‘Demolition’, deals with the causes of austerity and its impact on all areas of society. The second, ‘Austerity and Democracy’, charts its chilling impact on our democratic freedoms. ‘Demolition’ begins with the history of the international financial organisations that dominate our world today.

Starting with the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the author explains how the formation of organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank set in motion a train of events that have led us to where we are now.

She demonstrates how the IMF used structural adjustment programmes to ‘aid’ developing countries, while in fact trapping them in a cycle of debt that was impossible to escape. This, she argues, helped maintain the benefits of empire (for the interests represented by these institutions!), even when former colonies achieved their independence.

Mendoza further describes how the systems of international finance and governments were in a state of collusion for many years prior to 2008.

So, when the banks collapsed due to over-leveraged consumers, instead of tackling the roots of the problem, ‘toxic’ private debt was turned into public debt. All of which has led to austerity – ‘Structural Adjustment with a new name’.

Mendoza also describes how the financial system is skewed to create a ‘zombie’ economy that increases the paper value of an asset, financialises it to the point of collapse, and then leaves consumers with the bill. And she explains how this has resulted in privatisation in all aspects of public services, and the damage this is doing to the NHS, education and social security.

The book’s second half looks at the ways in which austerity culture has led to the demonisation of difference – from disabled and sick people in Britain, to sex workers and LGBT communities in Greece – the rise of a ‘corporate fascism’, and impacts on employment, the justice system and civil liberties, which have left most of us poorer and less able to exercise our rights.

Mendoza concludes that the ‘end game’ of austerity is to make these changes permanent, de-civilising society, and that ending capitalism is the only way in which we can defeat such a prospect.

This is an absolutely brilliant book, well-researched and written, presenting what could be dense technical information in an extremely accessible fashion. Though the sheer relentlessness of the horrors of austerity did make me feel a bit gloomy at times, I was nonetheless left with a sense of hope.

Particularly since Mendoza’s final chapter lays out some practical solutions – including breaking up the banks, controlling the cost of living, and abandoning neoclassical economics – that are eminently achievable and worth fighting for.

A must-read for everyone fighting austerity, it introduced me to a lot that I didn’t know, providing useful examples and statistics, as well as putting much that I did already know into a broader context.

I realise now that every campaign and movement I’ve ever been involved in stems from the decisions made by the Bretton Woods conference. If we are to achieve long-lasting political change then we’re going to have to undo the assumptions made in 1944.

Mendoza has done us a great service in describing the situation so well, and tantalisingly promises a follow-up that will examine solutions to the problem in greater detail. Based on the brilliance of this book, I can’t wait to read it.

Review by Virginia Moffatt, originally posted by Peace News (http://peacenews.info/node/8159/kerry-anne-mendoza-austerity-demolition-welfare-state-and-rise-zombie-economy).

Capitalism is often thought of as driven by elites bent on attacking the lower classes. The enemy is clearly defined, the targets obvious. All we need to do is redistribute wealth and minimise their control.

In this lively if unhelpful book, Peter Fleming subscribes to this view wholesale, discussing ‘the palpable hatred that the neoliberal state apparatus has for most working people’, treating them ‘as if they are an “enemy within” requiring constant harassment and purging’.

However inconvenient it may be though, today’s state-subsidised market capitalism has taken shape as the result of a long series of disparate events. Strictly speaking, modern finance capitalism is amoral; it is divorced from morality, rather than bent on worker subjugation.

The problems we face are therefore very complex; a far more frightening scenario.

The hallowed status of work is certainly worthy of study. Yet the work Fleming analyses covers only the squeezed middle,in particular, the ‘Endies’ – the employed with no disposable income.

Comparing the voluntary over-workers with nicotine addicts, Fleming correctly states that many haven’t chosen to be comfortable slaves in office culture. This is where my sympathy ends though – they are not the only ones suffering and our attention would be better focused on the under- and the un- employed.

Seduced by hip terminology (‘viral capitalism in the bedroom’) and casual swearing – in order to maintain a tone of the daring academic with attitude – vast overgeneralisations comprise the majority of Fleming’s text. I suggest the reader be suspicious of grand theorising that claims an ‘end’ to whatever is on the table, as in the final chapter, ‘The End of Work’.

Worker alienation is, of course, a topic that has already been discussed in compelling detail by Marx, as well as the postwar Situationist, Guy Debord. Fleming’s vitriol provides fodder for those who refuse to see any worth in work per se, but he seriously misreads the fundamental nature of capitalism.

Review by Pascal Ansell, originally posted by Peace News (http://peacenews.info/node/8114/peter-fleming-mythology-work-how-capitalism-persists-despite-itself).

A huge and diverse amount of vernacular music was recorded in the late 1920s, a wave of world music consumption which saw its peak before the Wall Street Crash swept this immense body of activity aside.

‘Gramophone and phonograph companies fought with each other to capture the world’s vernacular musics through the new electrical microphones and to play them back through the new electrical loudspeakers’. Indonesian kroncong, Trinidadian calypso, Egyptian tarab and Brazilian samba were just a few of the many styles recorded for international consumption.

The musicians taking part received a mixed bag of empowerment and drawbacks from this ‘speculative mania’. The political effects were never straightforwardly for the people, or against them. But then what we might call ‘antimony’ is music’s ambiguous power: to be misappropriated to legitimise state power, or to contribute to grassroot solidarity as a ‘proletarian loudspeaker’.

An example of this contradictory power of music is Portugal’s fado: ‘first condemned and censored by the fascist regime; by the 1960s… it was increasingly incorporated into fascist nationalism. The regime depended on [its] popularity’.

However, if music becomes forgotten and then reclaimed, there is also the danger of ‘stultifying purism’ and the development of a ‘cult of authenticity’, as the past gains ownership of present innovation. Revivals should never ossify present-day music making, yet during the emergence of bossa nova in the late 1950s, Denning notes, ‘many defenders of “true Brazilian-ness” attacked the new music as if it were high treason’.

According to Denning, ‘music and sound are fundamental to social and political analysis. For music is an inherently social and political art.’ Yet he also strikes the right balance, never claiming that music determines social order, but recognising its place in grassroots activity and change.

Although theoretical and weighty, his writing is charged with an energetic desire to share great, if sadly obscure, music. All of which makes this book a delight to read sitting by a laptop, where the web and its musical archives awaits.

Review by Pascal Ansell, originally posted by Peace News (http://peacenews.info/node/8238/michael-denning-noise-uprising-audiopolitics-world-musical-revolution).